“The duty of youth is to challenge corruption” – Kurt Cobain

Integrity

To survive and avoid unwanted consequences, humans often have to suppress their feelings and behave insincerely. Being a mature adult means being very good at this – fighting fear at the dentist, restraining anger or excitement, faking a smile at work. Children are stereotypically bad at these things; something most adults look down on and see as their childrearing mission to “help them overcome” as soon as possible. They find childrens’ innocence and sincerity charming, but only in the way one might condescendingly admire and “respect” an animal before sending it to slaughter.

Children love, adults have values (used to insincerely ascribe moral worth to some people and things over others.)

Moral insincerity, like all insincerity, is facilitated by brain maturation and hardening life experience.

The War on Vulnerability

With sensitivity comes beauty, but also vulnerability, a fact sentient beings grow painfully aware of as we’re subject to a lifelong barrage of violence.

It becomes easier to ignore parts of one’s conscience than face up to the overwhelming injustice and moral responsibility associated with real life. The naive illusory utopia of childhood is replaced by the dishonest utopia of adulthood (poetic justice has it that the term ‘adult’ is derived from ‘adulterated,’ meaning ‘corrupt.’)

We’re pressured to “grow a thick skin” and “get over it,” gaslit about our feelings as immature and invalid and taught to acquiesce to authority without protest, earning our right to autonomy and self-esteem only with age and compliance. Our focus is drawn by carrot and stick away from inner feelings and toward economic, academic, and social success. “Wrong” becomes less about that which one sincerely disapproves of, and more about that which is shameful, undiplomatic, or looked down upon by authority figures and popular opinion. Most will submit to this mental slavery to some extent.

(img: Childish morality vs adult morality)

Neurology

Brain modularity/compartmentalization

One’s mental skill of overriding their immediate feelings in respect of mature concerns is called “executive function,” the ability to make upper-level decisions or “boss” or “parent” oneself.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions): “Although suppression of these prepotent responses is ordinarily considered adaptive, problems for the development of the individual and the culture arise when feelings of right and wrong are overridden by cultural expectations or when creative impulses are overridden by executive inhibitions.”

‘Prepotent response’ refers to the feeling or impulse which is initially the strongest. Executive function allows us to inhibit that response and override it with a different one. Think of someone on a diet resisting their urge to eat cake. Obviously this faculty is extremely important to moral conduct, but is not to be confused with moral character. Successful villains and heroes alike require strong executive function; like a gun, one may use it for evil or good.

Suffering serves the function of overriding other emotions. Pain has to be extremely powerful and unpleasant in order to overwhelm its victim enough to shift their focus and make them avoid it at all costs in the future. The same goal can be achieved with executive function, but with less suffering required. A compassionate and responsible caregiver allows us to stay childlike.

As true lovers of freedom, of following our sincere wishes, our spirit is that of the quintessential child. We refuse to trade freedom for material goals or an easy life. However, we recognize that we can’t achieve freedom without also achieving certain material goals. There will be times when we must harden ourselves, but even more importantly we must stay homeward bound. Contrary to popular morality which paints itself as , for us morality rooted in sincere, childish feelings of what we want and don’t want.

Virtue

Adulteration reflects the profound burden the need to ‘survive and reproduce’ places on a child as they mature. For the average person, with or without their consent, their clean, gracile, and energetic bodies grow hairy, muscular, fatty, oily, smelly, and odd-proportioned. Their metabolism slows down. They begin menstruating and become fertile, often consumed with sexual and romantic desire, at grave risk of unwanted pregnancy. Their brains come to excel at ruminating on troublesome mature topics like future worries and past regrets, or whether others like us; to the death of the spontaneity, playfulness, imagination, and simple satisfaction they used to enjoy. Even a baby has imminent unpleasantries of maturation, like teething and foul-smelling poo which accompany the need to incorporate solid food into their diet.

Ideally we’d be under no pressure to survive and reproduce, then suffering itself won’t have evolved. However, this fact of life is inescapable for the foreseeable future. We can ease and redirect much of the pressure socially and through personal effort, by both becoming proficient at the game and tweaking its rules, as explained in Anti-Darwinism. This way we can conserve some of the indispensable qualities of childhood into adulthood, such as neural plasticity and high energy levels, and dispense of some of the troublesome and not-so-valuable adult ones like beards and large breasts.

Children – simple beauty

Neotenous adults – powerful and elegant

Adults with strong secondary sex characteristics – beautiful to most, but awkward and only useful in an ignoble society